Where’s your switchblade? This is not the time to say nice things about Amazon or Bezos. Sincere good guy?

It is time to punch Amazon and keep punching. It doesn’t matter what they do with physical goods. It matters what they do with their data.

When I see Bezos down I kick him. But that’s just me. I’m a creep.

What’s the best e-book reader that’s not a Kindle, and how is it better?

… BB is a licensed Kindle-delivered blog. These very words about how Cory is keelhauling Kindle are being read on Kindles.

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I know the last 8 years of politics have lowered the bar about full disclosure and conflicts of interest, etc…. but I for one would love an entry on the finances of the BB/Kindle deal and I would also love for that entry to be linked every time a pro-Kindle post is made.

Now you’re picking an e-reader based on price, feaures, aesthetics, and availability of content.

The Sony seems to win the aesthetics war. I haven’t been that impressed with the store yet, though- the books available to me on the Kindle are better. (I do like the navigation on the kindle a bit better too. But sleek and silver seems to be everybody’s favorite.)

The Iliad is a very impressive piece of hardware- but currently more expensive than I can justify, and the store is, again, not as expansive as I feel that Amazon’s store is.

As far as content stored in the cloud, I’m not usng it as an excuse, as much a I am saying that there is a certain amount of trust that has to be exercised when using a cloud provided service- whether it’s facebook, gmail, or anything else.

I’m not denying the fact that the 1984 incident is ugly, but it still doesn’t prove to me that there’s malice involved.

Yes, amazon could change book content in the cloud.
yes, google could be forwarding all of your email to the government.
Cell Phone providers could be broadcasting your calls over the intercom in their offices.
The admins here at BoingBoing could be editing our posts to make some of us look like idiotic fools.

Your points are valid, but they’re not specific to only the Kindle, is all I’m saying. if you can provide me a comparable product that doesn’t suffer from the same limitations, I’ll gladly conceed that point.
I don’t know of any other similar product that allows you to sell an e-book that you’d previously purchased. Would I like a way for that to happen? yes, but nobody’s come up with a standard for that yet.

(It’s somewhat of a moot argument, as there AREN’T any other comparable devices- unless you turn the wireless on the kindle off and quit using the cloud services. At which point, the kindle behaves exactly as you’re suggesting it should. So yes, the wireless cloud is the trust issue involved. Don’t use it, and buy your stuff and annotate, andback up all the files on your computer via USB. it’s pretty simple. No possible chicanery by anybody else. That wireless switch is a big chunk of trust that you have to deal with or ignore.

The Kindle system needs to be redesigned if it’s to be trusted again. Local storage needs to be exclusively under the user’s manual control, an exclusivity enforced at the filesystem level, and this fact needs to be transparent to the user.

What amazon deleted was files in their managed datacenter cloud, and the side-effect was that of a magazine subscription- the kindle phoned home, saw that the file didn’t exist in the cloud, and the design of hte workflow indicated to the kindle that the product was no longer supposed to be there. By deign of the customer or the overlord, it coudln’t tell- it was just following its phone home design.

Amazon did NOT send a mass delete command out to the kindles. What it did was mass delete the files on its own store, and then when the kindles called home, they assumed that deletion = no longer wanted.

What amazon SHOULD have done is just not offer the book for sale, but left it in the cloud where it was. Didn’t happen.

I’m willing to chalk this up to short-sighted stupidity, rather than deliberate malice.

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And the point about “why do I need a kindle when I have a netbook” misses the point of e-paper entirely. It’s easier to read on. That’s the extent of it. You can read it all day and not have eyestrain. Read read read read read. No backlight, no fussing with brightness in the sunshine, no power bricks after 8 hours on the beach sipping pina coladas.

e-paper is a great device for voracious readers. The world hasn’t figured out how to own or make money from bits yet, though- and that’s what the kerfuffle is about.

Given what we’ve seen so far I would assume that Amazon can update a book on a Kindle without notifying the user.

I’m sure there are a lot of governments in the world that would love to have that feature.

Printed content leaves a history that electronic content does not.

This is another case where open source would make sense, because it makes it much easier to verify what your device is actually doing.

The problem is, Amazon wants us to think we are buying the book when we click on “buy now with one click” button. The language on site is misleading, the price indicates that it is indeed a sale and not a rent. And they have been very, very successful in misleading their customers. The fact that the vast majority of people were very surprised by the events is very good proof of that. Very few people read the small print in the long and complicated EULA and Service Terms. Very few people considered that Amazon was deleting old versions of their newspaper subscriptions.

When you click on “buy now with one click” button you are in fact paying for a very limited license to read the book for limited time, on limited number of devices. The number of times you can download the book is limited as well and you can not find out what the limit is, the number of devices is limited and you have no way of knowing the limit. The amount of text you can put into your clippings is limited as well. Text To Speech might be forbidden for that particular book. And you can not sell (or give) the book when you are finished the way you sell the dead tree version. Yet, you still pay the full price.

People are only now starting to realize they only rent the books,
People are only now starting to realize the their Kindle phones home with a very detailed log every time it connects to the Whispernet.
People are only now starting to realize the Amazon has the ability and the inclination to delete the books from their Kindle.

After reading Bezos’s apology, I clicked on his name to go into his Amazon profile. And it turns out that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is one of the three books that Jeff Bezos has reviewed on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2QNLVM0O22JMI/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Maybe you can use that as some kind of means into his heart.

I don’t care if there isn’t a product similar to the Kindle that allows as easy resale as paper books. I’ll just continue to read paper books waiting for a digital book reader I can use in freedom. I’m under no obligation to think well of the Kindle even if resale works without fault. I think most ordinary customers who learn of this Orwell episode will conclude that that is enough to disconsider the Kindle. It’s simply too much of a risk of one’s freedom.

So yes, the wireless cloud is the trust issue involved. Don’t use it, and buy your stuff and annotate, andback up all the files on your computer via USB. it’s pretty simple. No possible chicanery by anybody else.

Again with the unverifiable claims. The software used to operate the Kindle is proprietary. We don’t know what it can do with or without a wireless connection. Timebombed proprietary software exists, so one need not possess much technical imagination to know that proprietary software can behave radically differently at different times leaving people unable to do anything to alter that behavior, even if they’re willing to install modified software they trust more.

Networking isn’t something required for reading. Amazon’s actions are reasons I won’t get a Kindle, or any other reader for that matter, that does anything more than load a book from USB or SD.

Since the wireless is off on mine, I tend to think of it as “severing communication with the mothership.” But that might be a little ungainly for a catchphrase.

My understanding is that Amazon used to offer DRMed music files. They changed their policy due to consumer demand, and now only offer DRM-free MP3s.

I would think that provides hope, that if we, as consumers, can push back on ebooks, like we did with music, then we would see similar results.

Best of all, when I buy e-magazines from Fictionwise I can keep them until I’m ready to read them, which is good because I tend to read them in job lots.

The real benefits of the Kindle come with too many costs for my liking.

The reason, he is sorry because Amazon got busted by all the horrific things they did to their customers. The irony of the Orwell books made it even better.

I wonder if he would have apologized if he hadn’t been busted.

Yeah, we know. But I don’t want to reward them by buying the device that’s the central part of their terribly flawed scheme. Not even given that the device’s non-DRM features are pretty nifty — I don’t want to encourage them. If they want my money, they’ll need to stop trying to sell people on the idea that tethered devices are a good thing.

In the meantime, I have no shortage of physical books to read, and if I really want to read a freely available ebook, FBReader on my Nokia n800 is passable, if not as good as an e-ink reader.

1) Nobody should ever say “Here’s what our EULA means”. If they do that they’re effectively substituting one EULA for another. The EULA means what it says, and if you’re unclear about its application in a particular instance you can always go to court and let a court make a definitive ruling.

2) Amazon has patents. The patents are publicly available, so you can form your own opinion over what is covered and whether the patents are enforceable. If Amazon thinks you’re infringing on a patent it may sue you, but it will never say upfront “this is not infringing”. It’s like the EULA: by making a statement it may be altering its legal rights, and this will always be to its detriment – it can’t get stronger patent rights by claiming that something is prohibited but it can certainly weaken its rights by implying that something is permitted.

3) Can the Kindle …? Yes, as I understand it. Amazon has complete technical control over content stored on a Kindle. The question is whether they have a right to do this under the EULA, and whether they will choose to do this. As I said in my earlier post, a court order might require them to take any action they are capable of. This might include deleting content, scrambling it, or replacing it with rude limericks.

I don’t think Amazon realised the hole they were digging for themselves when they chose this business architecture. As other people have said, this is the root of their problem. They set up a system where they retain control over your “purchase”, and now they’ve found that liability comes with control. I believe that they would have done much better to have treated sales as being equivalent to physical sales, but I suspect the book publishers asked for the ability to control content. So this may not have been an option. It might simply be that given the current copyright regime, Amazon’s Kindle model is the best deal that book publishers are willing to grant consumers.